Floatbot Contributes in Making Smart Cities in India

Use of chatbots is on its peek now. We can say till now almost everyone is aware of chatbots and have used once in their lifetime and 55% of consumers are interested in interacting with a business using messaging apps to solve a problem. Statistics show that people like to talk to chatbots, they find it helpful because they get instant replies.

Of course, Life becomes easy when you get an “Always online” agent on your favorite platforms. And chatbots acts similar to such agents, which replies instantly anytime, also easily manageable. Based on the data and current scenario, use of AI chatbots will affect our lives deeply, almost in all sectors chatbots have dispersed. This also includes public sector, where the advancement in technology is slow.

If we talk about government sector then chatbots are slowly transpiring in governments sectors too. In the mission of making smart cities in India, adapting chatbots by government bodies will make a lot of difference in the mission.

To brief on Smart City Mission, it was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 25^th, 2015. The mission includes the goal to make 100 smart cities across India. Smart city involves the use Information and communication technologies to improve government services in city for citizen welfare.

In consideration of the mission, we can say chatbots can contribute a lot to smart city mission, and so is being implemented by few cities by now.

On 11^th December 2017, Rajkot Municipal Corporation launched AI floatbot on its portal. Floatbot functionality incorporates online services such as birth, death certificate, payments of taxes, complaints etc, and access to various department info. These are services and information which is otherwise little difficult to find on the portal. Therefore this addressed a very basic need i.e, easy accessibility through a chatbot.

Likewise, the chatbot on the portal is helping citizens in many ways. Untill today RMC chatbot answered to 1001 citizen queries. This shows that bots are turning out to be quite helpful for municipal corporations.

One more municipal corporation adopted the power of floatbot (chatbot). Pune Municipal Corporation recently integrated floatbot on its website. The bot not only gives access to various info but also registers for the complaints and they personally address to each of the registered complains.

This gave citizens the power to stand for their issues regarding city problems. Now they can directly approach to a municipality for their issues.

Below image shows floatbot on PMC portal. In few days PMC chatbot responded to 1402 users. 

Seeing above data, we can say that the implementation of chatbots on municipal portals helps citizen in getting quick response for their queries.